J.M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg

Upon him bursts the thought of Pavel's last moment, of the body of a hot-blooded young man in the pride of life striking the earth, of the rush of breath from the lungs, the crack of bones, the surprise, above all the surprise, that the end should be real, that there should be no second chance. Under the table he wrings his hands in agony. A body hitting the earth: death, the measure of all things!

'Prove to me…' he says. 'Prove what you say about Pavel.'

Nechaev leans closer. 'I will take you to the place,' he says, enunciating each word slowly. 'I will take you to the very place and I will open your eyes for you.'

In silence he gets up and stumbles to the door. He finds the staircase and descends, but then loses the way to the alley. He knocks at random on a door. There is no answer. He knocks at a second door. A tired-looking woman in slippers opens it and stands aside for him to enter. 'No,' he says, 'I just want to know the way out.' Without a word she closes the door.

From the end of the passage comes the drone of voices. A door stands open; he enters a room so low-ceilinged that it feels like a birdcage. Three young men are lounging in armchairs, one reading aloud from a newspaper. A silence falls. 'I'm looking for the way out,' he says. 'Tout droit!' says the reader, waving a hand, and returns to his newspaper. He is reading an account of a skirmish between students and gendarmes outside the Faculty of Philosophy. He glances up, sees the intruder has not stirred. 'Tout droit, tout droit!' he commands; his companions laugh.

Then the Finnish girl is at his side. 'Heavens, you are poking your nose into the strangest places!' she remarks good-humouredly. Taking his arm, she guides him as if he were blind first down another flight of stairs, then along an unlit passageway cluttered with trunks and boxes, to a barred door which she opens. They are on the street. She holds out a hand to him. 'So we have an appointment,' she says.

'No. What appointment do we have?'

'Be waiting at the corner of Gorokhovaya on the Fon-tanka this evening at ten o'clock.'

'I won't be there, I assure you.'

'Very well, you won't be there. Or perhaps you will. Don't you have family feeling? You aren't going to betray us, are you?'

She puts the question jokingly, as if it were not really in his power to harm them.

'Because, you know, some people say you will betray us despite everything,' she goes on. 'They say you are treacherous by nature. What do you think?'

If he had a stick he would hit her. But with only a hand, where does one strike such a round, obtuse body?

'It doesn't help to be aware of one's nature, does it?' she continues reflectively. 'I mean, one's nature leads one on, no matter how much one thinks about it. What's the use of hanging a person if it's in his nature? It's like hanging a wolf for eating a lamb. It won't change the nature of wolves, will it? Or hanging the man who betrayed Jesus – that didn't change anything, did it?'

'No one hanged him,' he retorts irritably. 'He hanged himself.'

'The same thing. It doesn't help, does it? I mean, whether you hang him or he hangs himself.'

Something terrible is beginning to loom through this prattle. 'Who is Jesus?' he asks softly.

'Jesus?' It is dusk; they are the only people on this cold, empty back street. She regards him disbelievingly. 'Don't you know Jesus?'

'When you say I am Judas, who is Jesus?'

She smiles. 'It's just a way of speaking,' she says. And then, half to herself: 'They don't understand anything.' Again she proffers a hand. 'Ten o'clock, on the Fontanka. If no one is there to meet you, it means something has happened.'

He refuses the hand, sets off down the street. Behind him he hears a word half-whispered. What is it? Jew? Judas? He suspects it is Jew. Extraordinary: is that where they think the word comes from? But why his fastidiousness about touching her? Is it because she may have known Pavel, known him too well – carnally, in fact? Do they hold their women in common, Nechaev and the others? Hard to imagine this woman as held in common. More likely she who would hold men in common. Even Pavel. He resists the thought, then yields. He sees the Finn naked, enthroned on a bed of scarlet cushions, her bulky legs apart, her arms held wide to display her breasts and a belly rotund, hairless, barely mature. And Pavel on his knees, ready to be covered and consumed.

He shakes himself free. Envious imaginings! A father like an old grey rat creeping in afterwards upon the love-scene to see what is left for him. Sitting on the corpse in the dark, pricking his ears, gnawing, listening, gnawing. Is that why the police-pack hunts the free youth of Petersburg so vengefully, with Maximov, the good father, the great rat, at its head?

He recalls Pavel's behaviour after his marriage to Anya.

Pavel was nineteen, yet obstinately would not accept that she, Anna Grigoryevna, would henceforth share his father's bed. For the year they all lived together Pavel maintained the fiction that Anya was simply his father's companion as an old woman may have a companion: someone to keep house, order the groceries, attend to the laundry. When – perhaps after an evening game of cards – he would announce that he was going to bed, Pavel would not allow Anya to follow him: he would challenge her to rounds of cribbage ('Just the two of us!'), and even when she blushingly tried to withdraw, refuse to understand ('This isn't the country, you don't have to get up at dawn to milk the cows!').

Is it always like this between fathers and sons: jokes masking the intensest rivalry? And is that the true reason why he is bereft: because the ground of his life, the contest with his son, is gone, and his days are left empty? Not the People's Vengeance but the Vengeance of the Sons: is that what underlies revolution – fathers envying their sons their women, sons scheming to rob their fathers' cashboxes? He shakes his head wearily.

Arriving home, he is met in the passageway by Matryona in a state of great excitement. 'The police have been here, Fyodor Mikhailovich, they are looking for a murderer!'

Time stops; he stands frozen. 'Why should they come here?' The words come from him but he seems to hear them from afar, the thin words of someone else.

'They are looking everywhere, all through the building!'

From Anna Sergeyevna he gets a fuller story. 'They are questioning people about a beggar who has been haunting the neighbourhood. I suppose I must have seen him, but I can't recall. They say he has been sheltering in this building.'

He could at this point reveal that Ivanov has spent a night in her apartment, but he does not. 'What is he accused of?' he asks instead.

'The police are being very tight-lipped. Matryosha says he killed somebody, but that is pure gossip.'

'It's not possible. I know the man, I spoke to him at length. He is not a killer.'

But, as it turns out, it is not just gossip. There has ' indeed been a crime; the body of the victim, the beggar-man himself, was found in an alley just down the street. This he learns from the concierge, and is shaken. Ivanov: one of those bad-penny faces that turn up at one's deathbed, or at the graveside; not one to die first.

'Are they sure he didn't simply perish of cold?' he asks. 'Why does it have to be murder?'

'Oh, it's murder all right,' replies the old man, with a knowing look. 'What surprises me is that they are going to all this trouble over a nobody.'

Over supper Matryona will speak of nothing but the murder. She is overwrought: her eyes glisten, words tumble out of her. As for him, he has his own story to tell, but that must wait till her mother has calmed her and put her to bed.